What Fathers Know Best?

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When our son was three, I remember my soon-to-be-70 mother chasing him around the dining room table and spending most of the day sitting on a hard wooden staircase with him, wearing a hardhat and facing a closed door, pretending to be first mate on the Nautilus from "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea." "Giant squid astern!" our pre-schooler would yell, and my mother would shout something equally frantic and faux-nautical.

I've always associated my mother with energy and play, and Dad, with work and fatigue. As a child of the '50s, I grew up in a typical good-cop/bad-cop household, where Mom had the primary child-raising job, but chastised, more than a few times, "Wait until your father gets home." Dad's famous last words, meanwhile, went something like, "I have to get my belt." Discipline was his territory, but Dad also saw himself as The Provider. Unlike the T.V. fathers on "Leave it to Beaver" or "Father Knows Best," who, despite being sole providers themselves, always seemed to be hanging around the house, Dad worked long hours to pay the bills and make enough extra so the family could take a vacation every year. Which meant that I hardly saw him. Mom took us shopping, played games with us, and went to movies with us all the time. She especially loved musicals and romantic comedies, and now, so do I. My dad? Often, he'd be gone when I woke for school, and he wouldn't return until I had my pajamas on, just barely in time to say our good-nights. There were very few of those father-son moments I saw weekly on television.

Mostly, I connected with my dad on weekends, and on family vacations. Dad loved working with wood, and he was always engaged in some sort of home improvement project. I looked forward to helping him because it meant we could be together. However token my help was, I'd hold the end of a board while he guided it across his table saw, or screw something in while, straining and perspiring, he held things in place. If I asked him, he'd play catch with me on the sidewalk later in front of our Chicago house, and, yes, I remember him running alongside while I attempted to ride my two-wheeler without supports. On vacations, we always went "up north" to Wisconsin, where we rented a cabin for a week, sometimes two--often with my father's parents. Three generations would go out in a boat to fish together. We'd wake before dawn and motor to a "good spot" miles from the cabin, then cast a shoreline choked with lily pads until lunchtime. We weren't exactly pros, and so there was always more talk than fish. It didn't take me long to realize that fishing was just a pretense for spending time together, and that any fish we caught were a bonus. Same thing with Da Bears. Dad managed to get season tickets for many years, and we watched them in person when they still played at Wrigley Field. For road games, we sat on the couch together, snacking and shouting at the television. Then, at halftime, we'd go into the basement to shoot pool or play ping-pong. I learned early, growing up, that men need diversions like that to make conversation and communication possible.

Such things formed the basis of my relationship with my father, as they did (sans football) with his own. But while I lived near one of the best salmon rivers in California and, later, Wisconsin lake country, as a single parent in grad school I couldn't afford to take my own children fishing, so that tradition was broken. All four will instead remember the ways in which we connected: watching movies and television, baking and cooking (I was, after all, both mother and father in this household), playing soccer and basketball, and working together for the Hemingway Days Festival in Key West, where I directed the annual writers' workshop. Those were our arenas of contact and communication.

The two children I have at home now will remember other things. Because I write film reviews, the family movie nights have become more frequent, and my nine-year-old son and five-year-old daughter will often give me their opinions, adding, "You should write that down." I'm no longer involved in Hemingway Days, but as an established professor I travel more now for research, conferences, and speaking engagements. The kids have already been to France, Denmark, Germany, and Ireland, where we've had plenty of adventures. And we fish, which makes me feel like a child all over again.

My father often told me that he regretted not being able to spend more time with his sons. "Maybe I should have worked less and not worried so much about money," he said. "But I did what I thought I had to do." Those words haunted me for a long while, and maybe they helped to shape my own attitude that time spent with my children is more important than being able to buy them Air Whatevers or the latest in Tommy Hilfigers. When I was a single parent, "The Bill Cosby Show" was served up as the model for fatherhood, and more than once my kids drew the inevitable comparisons: Spends lots of time with his children? Check. Sense of humor and constant joker? Check. Cares about the kids' interests and activities? Check. Does crazy and spontaneous things with the family? Check. Responds to disasters or bad behavior with a cute face? Oops. Never raises his voice? Double Oops. Never swats or spanks? Sorry. In these last three departments, like my dad before me, I came closer to the cursing and furnace-banging model from Jean Shepherd's comic memoir, "A Christmas Story." Naturally, it bothered the hell out of me, because single parents feel a tremendous pressure to be the perfect father AND mother.

I never fully realized the power of our cultural associations with "father" and "mother" until I became a single parent just before "Kramer vs. Kramer" came out on film, at a time when single fathers were a huge anomaly. I was the only male single parent I knew, and in Wisconsin, America's heartland, I encountered nothing short of discrimination. When I'd take the kids (then 6, 4, 3 and 2) shopping, the female checker would smile and banter with the little ones. But one day she said, "Giving Mom a day off from shopping?," and I responded, "No, their mother lives in California. We're divorced." Big mistake. Suddenly the jaws stopped chewing gum, the eyes scanned all five of us, and she announced, loudly enough for everyone in the store to hear, "Well, I think that's terrible. Children should be with their mother." I didn't even bother to explain to her that the kids' mother agreed that I would be the better parent, and did not even petition for custody. Why bother?

Then there was the phone call from the mother of my six-year-old daughter's best friend, saying that the kids had apparently cooked up plans to have her daughter spend the night at our house. Did we know, and was it all right with us? Of course, I told her. "Great. Put your wife on the phone and we can work out the details." When I told her I didn't have a wife, that I was a single parent, it was as if the phone wires had been cut. Then came the sputtering excuses and second thoughts about how so-and-so just spent the night at another friend's house the previous evening, and maybe it was better if . . . but of course I cut her off, realizing that a single man in a house with little girls just wasn't trusted the same way that a single woman was trusted with little boys. So I added, "I understand perfectly. I was a full-time substitute teacher in California, and now I teach at UW-Milwaukee. Kids are often better when . . ." and here she cut me off, because apparently my being a teacher cancelled out any fears she had about single males alone with her daughter.

Most memorable, though, was the time that I took all four children to the local high school swimming pool. After the boys and I dressed, I waited outside the women's locker room for my daughters, and had to ask several people going in if they'd check on the girls to make sure they weren't having trouble with their suits. But after our swim? More shocking than the cold water, as I'm standing in the men's locker room butt-naked with my boys, a woman walks in with her seven or eight year old and announces, "It's okay, I'm a mom," and, half-gawking at me, proceeds to prattle about how she thought he was too big to be taking into the women's locker room. Needless to say, I was rattled, and all the way home tried to picture the reaction in the women's locker room had I sauntered in with my daughters and said to all those naked mothers, "It's okay, I'm a dad." Yeah, that would have gone over well. Mothers and fathers were not created equal.

With my first four, I was one of the youngest fathers at school events. Now, I'm one of the oldest. My mother, who has boundless energy, likes to say that "You're as old as you feel." She reminds that Picasso fathered a child at the age of 81, and Tony Randall also fathered a child late in life. Yeah, I bite my tongue, and he died before his kid ever made it to grade school.

When I think of fatherhood now, especially after my mother's remarks, I'm struck by the lifetime of stored images and impressions--a kind of ongoing Cubist collage--that shapes our behavior. In this, I'm probably not much different from other men. After all, fatherhood is role-playing, and just as an actor can't help but think of all the greats (or no-talents) who played the part before him or are starring in a rival production across town, we fathers exist in a state of constant comparisons. That guy down the street who sits on the porch in his t-shirt and only relates to his son by yelling to fetch him another beer? He strokes our egos. The fellow who finds time, somehow, to attend every most of his kids' open-houses, plays, concerts, and games? He makes us work harder. The Martha Stewart dad who has the know-how and tools to help his son craft the perfect Cub Scouts' Pinewood Derby racer--the inevitable, factory-looking winner that makes ours look like half-whittled cigars? He beats our egos down. But consciously or subconsciously, we cobble together bits and pieces of fathers we've known--yes, even movie and T.V. fathers--in the periphery of everything we do that's connected to parenting. And we try, somehow, to put our spin on it. That's a lot of pressure.

Before our son was born in 1998, I polled students who had told me they had fathers significantly older. Did they have any regrets or resentment? I wanted to know. Thankfully, all of them reassured me that they were grateful for the father they were born with, grateful for however long they would have him, and just as grateful for the ways they were able to "bond," even if it meant something as simple and immobile as doing a crossword puzzle together. I was also reassured, strangely enough, by the obituaries which daily told the sad stories of fathers in their twenties and thirties who died leaving toddlers behind. There are no guarantees in life, I was reminded.

My own father died in 1995 while I was teaching overseas as a Fulbright scholar. Getting his good-bye phone call was a real shock, not just because I learned he was dying and dying quickly, but because our finances wouldn't permit me to fly back to the States for his funeral. "It's okay," he said. "We spent time together when I was alive. That's the important thing." In that final conversation, and in a letter that arrived long after he had passed away, my father told me, sounding as cryptic as "The Da Vinci Code," just one thing: "No regrets." At the time, I was convinced he meant that he had no regrets, that he had lived life as best he could, and that he intended that to help me deal with his passing. But his mortality got me thinking of my own, and, having recently remarried, knowing we would start a family together, it struck me that I would be full of a thousand regrets if I were to die before having the chance to help raise my young children.

I live in an old house that was built in 1906, a house that's so always in need of repairs that my woodworking father would have loved it. As I fix up this room or that, I often find myself cursing and recall my father's own colorful language, the beads of perspiration that would form on the tip of his nose as he struggled with every project. When I reconnect with him in moments of déjà vu like that, it makes me think that he may well have intended "no regrets" as a final bit of advice to his oldest son, one he knew would soon start the fatherhood cycle all over again. In an old house, no wall is ever true. It's why every room takes forever to patch, plaster, prime, and paint. No wonder my wife was concerned that the rooms wouldn't be finished in time for each new baby.

My father was like Ricky Ricardo and Rob Petrie when it came to the birthing process. I paced nervously in the waiting room, far from the action. I was in the room for all but one of my children's births--even the C-sections. When my nine year old was born, he was yanked unceremoniously from his mother's womb and placed in the warmer. Then I spoke his name and tried to calm him in a voice I used to read to him and talk to him while he was still responsible for the bulge in my wife's maternity clothes. Before his nostrils were even suctioned, before his skin could fade from purple to healthy pink, we connected. Magically, he quieted.

Today, because it's Father's Day, I'll connect with my children (both adult and still at home) over games of badminton and softball. Later, with only the little ones, I'll watch another movie and review it while they're asleep. And when I tuck them in, I'll feel the rush of fatherhood that comes all bundled up in a warm confusion of memories that involve my grandfathers as well. In the end, it doesn't matter how long, how often, or even how vigorously you connect with your children. It doesn't matter if that connection is over movies, fishing, sports, or chess sessions on the front porch. It only matters that you connect somehow, because for children, a little goes a long, long way. There is no such thing as a perfect father. I don't know any real Jim Andersons, Ward Cleavers, or Cliff Huxtables. All you can do is the best you can. Accept the hand you're dealt. Forge ahead. Be happy. And most of all, no regrets.

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